Wolfenstein 3D, back in the good ol' days
Wolfenstein 3D has always been near and dear to my heart. It may not be the first computer game I ever played but it obliterated all other competition for that era of my childhood. Many were the afternoons spent pressing the spacebar on every available tile looking for secret passages and blazing Nazis with a chaingun.
There was something to that game that I can’t quite put my finger on. It had a very late 80’s/early 90’s action movie mentality (which might also explain my childhood obsession with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies). It starts like this: You’re an Allied soldier trapped in a Nazi prison castle. After arriving in your cell, you promptly snap the neck of a guard, steal his pistol and go on a brutal rampage through this fascist doom-fortress (which, incidentally, is far more sprawling and terrible than anything I could have possibly designed in Dwarf Fortress).
Along the way you face a variety of terrible super-Nazi science experiments, zombies, and yes, hulking steroid-using armored boss-Nazis with chainguns for hands. There is no plot; only evil Aryans to destroy, and sweet Nazi gold to plunder. The objective is never revealed to you, but after playing through a dozen or so levels you realize that escape is not your goal. There are several windows and courtyards that look out into the starry German night beyond, but you proceed to elevator after elevator down (or up?) into the catacombs to face far more terrible bloodthirsty monstrosities.
Mach es dir selber, mein Führer!
When I was a child I had no idea what was coming until he appeared. That’s right, HIM, the Führer himself, sheathed in a giant mech-battlesuit that would make any Japanese robot blush. That is how badass B.J. Blazkowicz is. When he is caught in a Nazi prison camp he marches right up to the leader of the Nazis and has a shootout with him (despite the fact that he has no armor).
Then they made more games. It is a little incredible that they could actually find a use for this license after that. How could this game ever be reinvented after the demise of the muscled action hero shooter genre died? Well remember when Saving Private Ryan came out? It was quickly followed by a slew of World War II shooters like Medal of Honor, and continued with Call of Duty. Right in the middle of all that there was a simple, beautiful, frustrating game called Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Ah, the Heroes of Olde
More Nazis, more occult, more hot chicks with machine guns, more undead and more of everyone’s favorite giant cybernetic super soldiers: the Ubersoldaten. It had shockingly few deviations from the original save the redesign of Blazkowicz to an actual Allied soldier, not a steroid abusing, grey jumpsuit-wearing mental patient. It was great, even with some crappy scientist as an end boss (as opposed to Hitler himself). There was also a weird storyline dealing with an ancient warrior imprisoned by a wizard? To be released to conquer the world for the Third Reich? Whatever… It was great and recognized its own campy failings. That, and it had a great multiplayer mode which eventually evolved into Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
Wolfenstein, reimagined as a modern game. Oh wait, it's real.
When I set out to play the newest iteration of Wolfenstein I thought I knew what to expect. Just a simple polished fun title that was devoid of solid plot but filled with the same run and gun mechanics with fun weapons and insane enemies.
Not so much. The new Wolfenstein just has trouble finding itself as a game. It is a crazy mix between Call of Duty and Tomb Raider that has never before been seen in the series. Just take a look at the character design for this episode. If you can imagine Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake having a clone baby together, you’ll begun to see what I mean. The biggest problem with the new Wolfenstein comes from its struggling to keep its old game mechanics while integrating regenerative health. Because health regenerates Wolfenstein rewards players for exploring the maps and finding all the secret areas with Nazi gold and intelligence, instead of secret weapon and health caches. It implements a weapon upgrading system via “weapons shops” in addition to mission hubs, safe houses and more German countryside to explore.
It works for a while, and it is interesting to go through the same area several times, fight guards, and see how they change as the war effort scales up and crazy new Nazi weapons are developed. The weapons are so fun to use (even if ammo is scarce) that it makes up for having to fight through the same area again and again just to get to a new mission.
But halfway through the game it hits me–this is not Wolfenstein. It is Grand Theft Kampfwagen, and you are helping gangs of German Rebels and Russian mystics fight the biggest mafia-esque gang ever: the Third Reich. It has a lot of the elements of the other games, but eventually the dullness of the Easter Egg hunts (disguised as gold- and intel- finding), the slogging back and forth, and the scripted boss fights begins to wear thin and I miss the linear narrative of the old Wolfenstein games.
While I do indeed miss being at the bottom of a castle and going up one elevator at a time, what I miss the most is a health bar. Regenerative health works for many games, such as Halo and even Call of Duty to an extent, but it doesn’t work with Wolfenstein. The secret areas you found in the original games were useful because they had desperately needed health and ammo as well as new guns to help take out that upcoming boss or bounce back from a fight where you screwed up. It tries very hard to keep that fun run-and-gun gameplay but then makes you feel guilty for not searching every house and secret door. The shootouts are by far the greatest part of the game, and Wolfenstein gives us tons of fun fight scenes and great moments where you get to unload on a cadre of barking Nazis.
It is just too bad that the great gunplay and awesome power of the weapons they give you are inter-spaced with long hunts around boring maps for nondescript sacks of gold and clipboards. Especially when you realize that the only real benefit to these long searches is to make the Unstoppable Deathray fire slightly faster, or turn Nazis into burning goo instead of simple dismembered corpses.
Even if it is flawed in some aspects the guys at Id gave it a good try, and developed some very cool toys that made the game entertaining, even if it was difficult to sort them out of the forced level exploration. If for nothing else but nostalgic value and its unapologetic use of the swastika (which is more and more absent from WWII games) Wolfenstien is worth a look, but it lacks serious innovation or a powerful enough experience to get an honest recommendation. That is unless you just watched Inglorious Basterds and are just itching to fire a plasma cannon at a platoon of SS Officers. Then, my friend, you are in luck.
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